Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9759781" data-attributes="member: 4937">"Railroad" is a metaphor.  In a game, the tracks never go everywhere, and the tracks can very much mostly go somewhere.  Truly facilitating the tracks going everywhere may not be possible.I thought you were disagreeing with me.  Those two statements are a big part of the basis of my argument.  If you recognize the truth of them, then you are mostly in agreement with me.  Even some of the most railroad-y scenarios ever published, like DL1 or the 2e AD&D novel tie-ins or that CoC adventure where the Great Race of Yith forces you to time travel to the end of the universe don't offer no freedom.  You still can do things and creative things within the framework of the story, it's just the major plot points will be hit and there isn't really anything you can do about it beyond perhaps commit suicide or otherwise quit the game.  So "no freedom" is for the most part a straw man, and in fact if you look at the history of "railroad" debates on ENWorld over the last 23 years you'll find that the vast majority of participants who used the word were fully willing to use it for any perceived loss freedom and agency.  The list of things that people will consider makes a game a railroad includes having a prepared adventure.  There have been people here willing to say that if it isn't "No Myth" then it is a Railroad.So your hyperbole about how it's not a railroad until you have "no freedom" is just not useful for accurate.  And I think the thing is that if we can argue about what sorts of losses of freedom count as railroading, then you can't claim that it is actually a qualitative statement even if most people perceive it that way.  What is actually going on is people mistake their subjective preferences for an objective standard, which is a very human thiing to do.  Railroading turns out to be a quantitative thing where people try to label everything beyond their preferred quantity or tolerable quantity "a railroad" or "railroading". And I think that's the logical implication of even your own statements and attempt to refute me.</blockquote>

Verification